page_title: The Snowstorm
section_title: Reception
hierarchical_section_title: The Snowstorm / Reception
caption_attribution_description: English: Top row (from left): Leo Tolstoy, Dmitry Grigorovich, Bottom row (from left): Ivan Goncharov, Ivan Turgenev, Alexander Druzhinin, and Alexander Ostrovsky Français&#160;: Portrait d'un groupe d'écrivains russes - La rédaction de Sovremennik. Ivan Gontcharov, Ivan Tourgueniev, Léon Tolstoï, Dmitry Vassilievich Grigorovich, Alexandre Vassilievich Drujinin, et Alexandre Ostrovski. Русский: Групповой портрет русских писателей - членов редколлегии журнала "Современник". Гончаров Иван Александрович, Тургенев, Иван Сергеевич, Лев Николаевич Толстой, Григорович Дмитрий Васильевич, Дружинин Александр Васильевич и Островский Александр Николаевич
context_page_description: "The Snowstorm" is a short story by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy. It was first published in 1856, in the literary and political magazine Sovremennik.
context_section_description: Unlike other text that Tolstoy published at this time (Two Hussars and A Landowner's Morning), reception of "The Snowstorm" among the literati of contemporary Russia, was generally favorable.
  "The Snow Storm" still benefited from his high reputation and was seen by its early reviewers less as prose as such, more as poetry in prose in its tonalities and even in its structure; Turgenev was as usual carried away, and Sergey Aksakov agreed, finding the description of the blizzard the most realistic he had ever read. Herzen thought it marvellous and Alexander Druzhinin wrote in the Biblioteka dlya chteniya that there had been nothing quite like it since the days of Pushkin and Gogol.
  In Modern Language Studies 1987, Sydney Schultze writes:
  This slender story serves as the vehicle for a beautiful description of a snowstorm surrounding an even more vivid description of a blistering day in July. But there appears to be no point to the story, no message of the sort one expects from Tolstoj even in his early works.
  Early commentators like Druzinin praised Tolstoj's descriptive powers in "The Snowstorm", but did not have much to say about other aspects of the story. Later critics have also paid little attention to "The Snowstorm" beyond a complimentary reference to the description of the storm. Typical is Ernest J. Simmons, who in his biography of Tolstoy says, "There is no plot; the theme is the storm ... The effectively repeated motifs of the snow and wind amount almost to the incremental repetition of a folk ballad." Ejxenbaum finds "The Snowstorm" notable for its plot arrangement, the weaving together of reality and dreams, rather than its fabula (story line).
caption: Contributors to Sovremennik in 1856 (left to right): Ivan Goncharov, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Dmitri Grigorovich, Alexander Druzhinin and Alexander Ostrovsky.
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